2022 IRIS Award Winner

Rebecca Geddes Receives 2022 IRIS Early Career Award

The 2022 IRIS Early Career Award, for work advancing small animal nephrology has been awarded to Dr. Rebecca Geddes in recognition of her studies into calcium phosphate homeostasis and the derangements that occur in cats with chronic kidney disease (CKD). The award is generously sponsored by Zoetis with a prize of 10 000 euros to support her ongoing research activity.

The IRIS (Early Career) Award was presented at the recent ECVIM congress in Gothenburg, Sweden (on 2nd Sept 2022) by the current Chair of the IRIS Awards Committee, Harriet Syme, herself a previous recipient of the award.

The International Renal Interest Society (IRIS) was created in 1998 to advance the scientific understanding of kidney disease in small animals. The IRIS board currently consists of 16 members representing 8 different countries. Additionally, from this year forwards a new IRIS Ambassador role has been created to represent veterinary communities in non-English speaking regions that are not otherwise represented.

Dr. Geddes graduated from Cambridge Veterinary School then spent time in veterinary practice working towards a certificate in feline practice before joining the Royal Veterinary College, London where she completed first a PhD, then an internship and residency in small animal internal medicine and is now employed as a lecturer with a focus on feline clinical research. Much of her work has centred around the regulation of calcium and phosphate – and how this is deranged in cats with CKD. In particular she has shown the prognostic importance of the phosphate-lowering hormone, fibroblast growth factor-23 (FGF-23), and that elevated concentrations of this hormone can serve as an indicator of increased phosphate load within the body, and the requirement for dietary therapy to address this.

On receiving the award Dr Geddes responded with the following remarks: "It was an absolute honour and pleasure to win the 2022 IRIS prize! I plan to use the award money to fund my developing research into calcium oxalate nephrolithiasis in cats." Further details of the award, please contact Harriet Syme hsyme@rvc.ac.uk, chair of the IRIS Awards Committee.